The Internet has become a main source of intercommunication throughout the United States and the world. Content, including audio and video, may be downloaded and played by consumers anywhere with access to the Internet. However, as high-definition (HD) video content and video on demand (VOD) have begun to become dominant standards for people to watch video, the ability to provide such high bandwidth via the Internet has become a daunting problem for communications service providers and content providers.
As understood in the art, tier 1 Internet providers that provide long haul transport of IP charge a premium for bandwidth capacity to local Internet service providers (ISPs). For example, long haul data traffic may cost an ISP $0.05 per megabyte ($0.05/MB), which may cost an ISP $100,000 per month or more. As content providers shifted website content to video, the cost of transport increased exponentially due to losing the ability to over-subscribe the traffic. Now that storage cost of decentralization has become cheaper than transport cost, network configuration for delivering content requires evolution.
There are several business models and website models that are used by content providers, such as Disney® and ESPN® television networks, that make content available to users of the World Wide Web. Conventional website models maintain video content at a central network location and a user downloads the video content when he or she opens a webpage that includes a frame or selection mechanism to download the video content to a media player on a laptop or set-top box. The video content typically is communicated over the Internet via a long haul communications service provider to a local ISP servicing the user. Such a model has a number of problems, including (i) cost for communicating data, (ii) “bottleneck” that exists at a local ISP connection to the Internet, (iii) inability for data communicated over the Internet to be guaranteed quality of service (QoS), and (iv) having limited bandwidth over the Internet. Additional problems exist for the model, including not knowing specific geographic location of the user, which limits targeted, geographic based advertising.
More specifically, peer-to-peer traffic flows on the Internet are generally scalable for short duration communication flows, such as data files and email. Short duration video, such as YouTube® video files, has created massive bandwidth increases that threaten to break the economic model of the Internet. Consumer television has been progressively moving from broadcast to on demand, as available via YouTube® and other video content providers. On demand television has changed the number of simultaneously transmitted channels from a single broadcast channel to a viewing region with many viewers to a single channel per subscriber. Neither the Internet nor regional core IP networks are economically scalable to sustain the amount of bandwidth needed to support video on demand type channel per subscriber service. The FCC has mandated high-definition television (HDTV), which requires three to five times more bandwidth capacity than standard definition television signals. The increase in bandwidth is needed for both RF and IPTV to meet the FCC mandate, as standard definition IPTV uses 2.5 megabits and HDTV uses 10 megabits per live stream. Furthermore, broadcast IPTV requires packet loss rates in the range of 10−6, which is a much higher requirement than can be provided via the Internet that typically requires 10−4. The Internet's best effort packet loss rate requirement coupled with the “best efforts” QoS communications design creates problems for near and long-term scalability to support video on demand.
One content distribution model that exists is offered by a content distribution network (CDN) service provider. A CDN is a service provider that manages a system of networked computers across the Internet that function to deliver content in a more efficient manner. Typically, a CDN places servers at the edge of an Internet provider network and website content is distributed to the local servers of the Internet for users to download regionally. While the CDN model is better than the centralized content distribution model, the CDN model has a few fundamental problems, as well. Typically, content owners desire to maintain control over the content and distribution thereof. The CDN model relinquishes control of the content by the content provider to the CDN. Another problem for the CDN is the financial model. Content providers tend to make the most money on the Internet, while service providers, such as CDNs, make the least. Still yet, the CDNs have little, if any, knowledge about physical locations of users, thereby limiting the ability for local advertisers to target local customers. Lastly, due to these servers being located outside of the network of the communications service provider or access provider, the CDNs still only provide best effort traffic with no QoS guarantees.
In summary, there are a number of fundamental problems for delivering content, especially high-definition content, via the Internet, as described above. Furthermore, financial models for delivering content in general (e.g., on demand television content) have been limited. Advertisers have yet to fully accept the delivery models because advertising has been unable to be targeted to known desired audiences. Television broadcasters have made efforts to distribute content to the Internet and mobile devices. However, the television broadcasters have experienced the problems identified above with no viable solutions to address all of the issues.